Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ...years to fulfil assiduously his functions as archdeacon and canon. lt was then that he preached the first sermons that we have of his, and his first panegyrics; also he took up arms for the first time as a controversialist against the Protestants, who abounded in that province. In a word, Bossuet conducted himself like a militant young Levite, who, instead of accepting at once an agreeable post at the centre of all things in the capital, preferred to inure himself and temper himself by bearing the arms of the Word where duty and danger called him, on the frontier. Of Bossuet's earliest sermons, among those he preached at Metz in his youth, one has been specially pointed out by the Abbe Vaillant; it is that for the ninth Sunday after Whitsunday. Bossuet seeks to show at one and the same time the kindness and the rigour of God, the tenderness and severity of Jesus. He begins by showing Jesus moved to pity9 when he enters the city that is about to betray him, and weeping over it; then he shows him irritated and implacable, avenging himself, or letting his Father avenge him on the walls and on the children of that same Jerusalem. This sermon preached, as Bossuet said in closing it, "as God has inspired it in me," has something youthful, eager, bold in places, rash, and even strange. He tries to represent in the same discourse the merciful Saviour and the inexorable Saviour, the tender heart and the angry heart of Jesus: "Listen first," he says, "to the sweet, benign voice of this Lamb without spot, and then you shall hear the roarings of the victorious Lion born of the tribe of Judah: that is the subject of this discourse...." More might be said on this first period of Bossuet's life, both...show more